The sentences of three teenage boys who raped two lone young girls in separate attacks will be reviewed by the attorney general amid widespread anger at how ‘lenient’ they were.
The boys – aged 14 and 15 – were spared jail despite being convicted of a total of 11 rape charges between them.
Southampton Crown Court heard they recorded the attacks on their phones, laughing and egging each other on while outnumbering their ‘cornered and petrified’ victims.
During their sentencing hearing last week, one of the girls said: ‘All I want to do is die.’
Rather than a custodial sentence, the trio walked free from court after being given youth rehabilitation orders (YRO).
A government spokesman has said yesterday the attorney general’s office had received ‘multiple’ requests for the sentences to be reviewed.
He said: ‘We share the public’s shock at the details of this horrific case, and our thoughts are with the young victims during this distressing time.
‘The law officers are urgently reviewing the case with the utmost care and attention.’
Jess Phillips, the former minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls (VAWG), said the lenient sentences ‘sends a bad message’.
She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘For those young women going through a rape trial like this will not have been a simple thing to do, it will have been many, many months, if not years, to achieve any sort of justice and I am afraid to say it sends a bad message.’
Ms Phillips added: ‘These young people it seems were essentially raping for content in order to put it on social media and share it to their friends gloating about raping these poor young women.’
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Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch called the sentences as ‘a disgrace’.
Ms Badenoch posted on X: ‘I have been sickened all day by the news of three boys who lured two schoolgirls, raped them and filmed it on their phones while they laughed and egged each other on.
‘When they finally stood before a judge this week, they were handed ‘rehabilitation orders’ and walked out without serving a single day behind bars.
‘Not in prison, not in custody or a young offender institution.
‘The judge said, ‘None of you need to go to prison’. What message does that send to rapists?
‘The crime could hardly be graver, yet the punishment was no punishment at all.’
Alicia Kearns MP, the shadow minister for safeguarding and VAWG, said she had referred them to the Attorney General.
Ms Kearns said: ‘These three boys committed horrific, premeditated offences against two innocent young girls, who will now carry the trauma of these attacks for the rest of their lives.
‘Yet our justice system seems more concerned with protecting the offenders’ futures rather than protecting the victims.’
Former Old Bailey judge Wendy Joseph told the Today programme that had the boys been adults the sentence they would have been looking at ‘15 years plus’, given the age of the victims, the fact a knife was present and that the assaults were being filmed.
‘Where you’ve got children, particularly as young as this, the judge slashes that sentence, so you might be looking at a sentence of half or less than half,’ she added.
‘But this judge has come to the conclusion that help is required rather than punishment.
‘It’s a brave step to take… you can see why he’s done it because the law says that children’s welfare takes precedence over most other things.’
In the sentencing hearing on Thursday, a 15-year-old boy was handed a three-year YRO with 180 days of ISS for the rape of each of the two girls and two indecent images charges.
The court heard he had been diagnosed with ADHD as well as ‘long-standing anxiety’.
A second 15-year-old was given the same sentence for three charges of rape against each of the two victims and four counts of taking indecent images in relation to filming of the incidents.
The court was told he had an IQ of the ‘bottom 1% of his contemporaries’ and had been diagnosed with ADHD.
The third boy, 14, was given a YRO for 18 months for two charges of rape in the January incident by encouraging the second defendant and an offence of indecent images.
He was described as having ‘mild cognitive impairment’.
Judge Nicholas Rowland told the defendants: ‘I have to remember that you are not small adults. I have to think how likely you are to do serious things again and I need to make sure you do not do serious things again in the future.’
Explaining his sentence, he added: ‘I should avoid criminalising these children unnecessarily and understand the effects of their behaviour and support their reintegration into society.’
He added that ‘peer pressure played a large part in what went on’.
The judge praised the ‘bravery’ of the two victims for giving evidence to the trial and for providing statements on how the offences had affected them.
The complainant of the first incident told the court: ‘No-one deserves the trauma of being raped.’
The second girl described in a statement how she continued to suffer from nightmares, and added: ‘The person I was before the incident has completely gone and sometimes I feel like I am grieving the person I used to be.’
The judge told them: ‘The sentence I am going to pass cannot possibly undo what happened to you.’
Jodie Mittel KC, prosecuting, told the trial the girl in the November incident, who was 15 at the time, had visited the first defendant after meeting him on Snapchat.
The prosecutor said that after performing sex acts on the boy, who was then 14, she became ‘scared and anxious’ when the second defendant arrived, and the pair raped her while the incident was filmed.
Ms Mittel said that afterwards, videos of the incident had been sent around and other people made jokes about her, and she received messages calling her a ‘slag’.
The complainant in the January incident, who was 14 at the time, was raped in a field near to Fordingbridge recreation ground while the incident was also filmed.
The boys were also made subject to a three-month curfew and given a restraining order for 10 years not to contact their victims.
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